S1E27: Release to Production

The phrase “release to production” conjures a very specific set of thoughts and even emotions for folks who live, breath, and work with technology. Some of those thoughts and feelings are positive, while others are fraught with conflict. At the same time, those of us who are active in our religious community experience a different kind of “release to production” – releasing our children to the production environment of our faiths, whether that is teaching abroad, missionary work, or adult religious education that takes our young adult across the globe. And like our IT-based production release experiences, we watch our kids transition into chaotic systems, where parental observability is minimal even as the probability of encountering unknown-unknown error types grows. In this episode, Leon and Josh to look at what our IT discipline can teach us about how to make this phase of the parental production cycle easier.

Leon: 00:00 Welcome
to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and
inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious
views working in corporate IT. We’re not here to preach or teach you
our religion. We’re here to explore ways we make our career as IT
professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life.
This is Technically Religious.

Josh: 00:21 The
phrase release to production causes a very specific set of thoughts
and even emotions for folks who live, breathe and work with
technology. Some of those thoughts and feelings are positive while
others are fraught with conflict. At the same time, those of us who
are active in our religious community experience a different kind of
release to production. Releasing our children to the production
environment of our faiths, whether that is teaching abroad missionary
work or adult religious education that takes our young adults across
the globe and like our it based production release experiences. We
watch our kids transition and to chaotic systems, where parental
observability is minimal, even as the probability of encountering
unknown, unknown error types grows. In this episode, we’re going to
look at what our IT discipline can teach us about how to make this
phase of parental production cycle easier. I’m Josh Biggley and the
other voice you’re going to hear on this episode is Leon Adato.

Leon: 01:27 I,
I never mind shameless anything and self-promotion either. So, uh,
I’m Leon Adato as you said, I’m a Head Geek at SolarWinds. Uh, you
can find me on the Twitters @LeonAdator. I also blog and pontificate
on my website www.adatosystems.com. And my particular religious
worldview is Orthodox Jewish.

Leon: 01:52 Fantastic.
And for those who are new to our podcast, I’m Josh Biggley. I’m a
Senior Engineer of Enterprise Monitoring. You can find me on the
twitters, um, @jbiggley. You can find my faith transitions community
at www.faithtransitions.ca, where you will be redirected to our
Facebook group. Um, I am currently a post Mormon transitioning into
being an ex Mormon. That’s where we start. So, uh, Leon, we’ve both
had some, uh, some challenges, um, that I think have precipitated
where we’re at with this particular episode.

Josh: 02:28 Um,
and as we were having the discussion, I was thinking I do love
poetry. Uh, I mean, uh, it’s a wonderful thing. I, I found a poem by
Robert Burns is from 1786, uh, entitled “To a Mouse”. And
I, I’d love to, I’d love to have someone else read a portion of that
because you know, the, to get the Robert Burns from 1786 just right,
uh, is important. So let’s listen to that now before we begin.

New
Speaker: 03:17 All
right. So I love that particular, uh, part of the poem, you know,
this, uh, Robert Burns wrote this poem, um, after plowing a field.
And, uh, as he was going along, he noticed that he tore up the, the
den, uh, of a mouse and, and that caused him to reflect on it and
write this poem. And for us, we have these, these plans that we lay
out, we, and we spend so much time invested in them and then the
chaos of the world grabs a hold of them and tears apart.

Leon: 03:53 Right.
And there’s a few things I like about this that first of all, the
poetry is, is heart stopping. It’s just amazing. And, um, but I also
like the fact that Robert Burns was plowing his field. He was doing a
very normal sort of work-based activity and yet he was also bringing
his other, I’ll use the word higher, I don’t mean it in any sort of,
you know, uh, value statement way, but he was using a more thoughtful
part of himself to it. You know, how many people are mowing lawn or
you know, just walking through, you know, a cut through and they
knock over it, you know, a nest of some kind or whatever and it’s
like, yeah, whatever, and you know, move on. But here, this really
obviously caused him some real introspection. And I think that that
is a wonderful analog to, uh, what we do as people with a religious,
moral or ethical point of view as we go through our it lives is that
we, we don’t divorce one from the other. And that sometimes moments
within our regular work day lives cause us this, this reflection. I
think it’s important to, to clarify that when we talk about releasing
to production, you know, tongue in cheek, because we’re talking about
our kids. This isn’t just, you know, kids going off to college or
getting a job or growing up, although it is those things. But it’s
particular to folks who live a, who live in a faith-based lifestyle.
Um, you know, there’s some very specific things that I think our kids
do that kids from a more secular background don’t. For example, uh,
you know, my kids went to either yeshiva or seminary after high
school, you know, or going to go, or in the process of going. And
you’ll hear more about that later. Um, you know, that’s, uh, one or
two or three years of purely religious education, not indoctrination.
It’s, you know, real deep dive into the, um, philosophy, theology,
you know, asking a lot of questions, challenging the thinking that
they’d grown up with learning the rest of the story kind of stuff.
And there’s also, you know, depending on your faith, there’s mission
work, there’s a student exchange programs, there’s teaching abroad,
there’s, you know, gap year programs, all of which send our kids
away. But not, again, not in the way that I think at least I think of
a secular experience, what my secular experience was, which was you
graduated from high school, you went to college, uh, or maybe a trade
school or whatever it is, and you got a job and, and you had your
life. But that’s not really what we’re talking about. We’re talking
about really releasing to a different kind of production system.

Josh: 06:38 You
know, and it’s interesting, I find that a lot of people are starting
to embrace this. Maybe alternative — is that the right word for it?

New
Speaker: 06:47 It
is. Yeah. It’s another option that I think wasn’t considered by our
parents when we were growing up. If you happen to be of a certain
age.

Josh: 06:56 Yeah.
When my daughter graduated from high school last year, she was not
the only person in her graduating class who was taking a gap year and
who was doing something during that gap year. Going to work during
gap here, you hear about that a lot, but taking that gap here and
doing what my daughter did, which was go to Haiti, um, during the,
you know, period of civil unrest that was going on, that was, that
was interesting.

Leon: 07:30 It
might have been interesting for her, but I’m sure it was interesting
in a whole different way for you and your wife.

Josh: 07:35 It
was uh, uh, we should talk about that in the future. It was a, it was
a very, yes. Interesting is a good word for it. You know, and my son
is a, is my son is on a mission right now. He comes home in a couple
of weeks, which we’re super excited about, but I, a bunch of kids
took, took a year off, you know, one went to France, one went to
Brazil as part of the Rotary Exchange program. So I, I’m courageous.
I’m, I’m excited for this future generation in my graduating class,
which wasn’t nearly as large as my daughters. I think I had 45 or 50
kids in my graduating class, but I was the only one who was going off
to do something other than go to college or university or go to work.
So I, it is, it is a very unique thing that we have because of our
faith. There’s a problem here though, and I, I, I do want to talk
about this. So, you know, having grown up, um, having grown up
Mormon, in fact, we just had some friends, uh, some friends, uh, uh,
family members of friends, I guess is the right way to put it. Who
stopped by unexpectedly and they said, “Oh, by the way, we know
your son Noah, you know. We’re from Utah. Here’s how we know Noah. We
met him while he was there.” And so we got to talking about
their family and they said to us, “Well, our son is, is and has
just proposed to his, his girlfriend, they’re going to get married.”
Well, when you’re a Mormon, you know that at 18 you become eligible
to go on a mission. And so we said, oh, he didn’t serve a mission.
Now this, this couple doesn’t know that we’re no longer practicing
Mormons. And you could just, you could see that just that flicker of
disappointment in their eyes because, uh, there’s that. “Yeah,
we’re from Utah and we know that our kids are supposed to go.”
So Leon, let’s talk about what happens when, when we spend our entire
lives trying to launch our children with their support…

Leon: 09:43 Right.
And, and I liked your phrasing. You know that it’s a launch plan and
T-Minus, and you know, remember that the, the astronauts in the
capsule are not unwilling participants in this. They’re, they’re just
as engaged in trajectory and speed and velocity. They may not be the
final arbiter of some of those things, but they are absolutely
involved in those plans in our kids. While they may not be the, the
final arbiter of how they get where they’re going or how quickly they
get where they’re going or whatever, they’re active participants in
helping plot the course. Um, so I like, I just liked the phrasing. I
think that’s really good. And Yeah, let’s talk about when things
don’t go. So, I think that if things don’t go as planned, uh, the
first question, at least that I’m thinking is, “Did I, you know,
was this a failure on my part to plan at all, you know, correctly,
appropriately? What did I miss?” I, I think that that’s, as a
parent maybe sometimes your first go to what, what did I do wrong?
You know?

Leon: 10:58 Um,
yeah, but if that is the one criteria that the self doubt, then
absolutely I have, I have piles and piles of good parenting. Yeah.

Josh: 11:09 Well,
and I think that’s important though when we look at our, when we look
at our children and we try to ask ourselves, why didn’t things go to
plan? We immediately look at ourselves mostly because we can, we can
change ourselves. We can’t change our children. We can sit them down
and we can lecture them for hours on end, but about 15 minutes and
they’re just going to stop listening. You know? I…

Josh: 11:36 I
was. I was hoping for a good day. Uh, yeah. I, I love the phrase
“Analysis Paralysis”. It’s something that I hear an awful
lot at work, especially as we’re using all the Buzz Word Bingo, key
phrases, right? Agile and DevOps. And I’ve heard a new one the other
day DevSecOps and I’m like, now we’re just making upwards. It’s
great.

Leon: 11:59 If
you’re playing along at home. Right? And you haven’t downloaded the
beat. You can download the Bingo card from TechnicallyReligious.com.

Josh: 12:06 Um,
but I, I think that we can get to that point where we look at sort of
the look at our lives and the lives of our children. We expect them
to do with some very rigid things.

Josh: 12:15 And
when they don’t, w things start to fall apart. We doubt ourselves. We
doubt our children. To me, that feels a disingenuous to the art of
raising children. Going back to, you know, to the Bible, right? Cain
and Abel, uh, you know, Adam and eve have these two kids can enable,
you know, great kids grew up while together. And then, you know, one
day Cain kills Abel. Did, did Adam and Eve, you know, did they see
that coming? Or they’re like, “What do we do wrong?”

Josh: 12:58 That’s
what happens when, when Alpha goes to prod, although it worked out
really well, so…

Leon: 13:03 Yeah,
well, it can, but it also can not. Um, and there’s even, there’s even
a question there, just if we’re going to invoke Cain and Able that,
that, um, Cain may not have understood. Look, Abel was the first
person to die at all. He may not have understood that killing was a
thing. Um, and in the original Hebrew, uh, the precursor to that
moment is they were out in the fields and Cain said to Abel “And
Cain rose up and slew Abel” There’s, there’s a missing, there’s
no texts there. Now as, uh, a person with two brothers. I can tell
you with absolute certainty that I know I have a good, I could make
some good guesses about what Cain said to Abel, that would cause Cain
to lash out. You know, it caused that conflict to occur. Um, however,
we don’t have textual, uh, textual evidence of it. But the point is,
is that, um, again, that probably wasn’t, uh, Adam and Chava, to use
the Hebrew names. Um, wasn’t their plan for, uh, what their kids were
gonna grow up to be or to do. Um,

Josh: 14:27 What,
what about, what about the attributes of our children though?

Josh: 14:30 I
mean, oftentimes we look at our kids and we want to see the very best
than them, but if our kids don’t follow our plan, and I will admit, I
am one of those kids that did not follow my parent’s plan. In fact,
uh, after I got home from Las Vegas, I explicitly things to, uh, I
want to say to make my parents upset. But when my parents said, don’t
do, I, I went ahead and did it. So when they said, hey, you know, you
shouldn’t get married at 21, I was like, no, I’m getting married at
21. Hey, you shouldn’t go. You know, you should not go to a school,
um, to do that. Oh yeah, no, I’m going to go to school and I’m going
to work full time. Uh, I mean, we’re going to tell the story a little
later, but it’s just, does that mean that word? Well, what does that
mean about our kids? What, what does that mean about me? I’m, I’m
gonna lay it down on the couch now. And you can tell me.

Leon: 15:24 Right.
So I think there’s a, there’s two aspects of that. First of all, um,
I think as parents we also put way too much stock in this moment.
This is the formative moment. If I don’t get this right as a parent,
it’s all downhill from there. Leon, she’s going into kindergarten. I
know, but it’s everything hinges on her getting into the right
kindergarten and her learning her abcs, she was slow to walk. You
know, we have to make up for that! I think she’s gonna do play time
just fine. You know, I, I think that sometimes we, we forget that,
you know, as much as we have recovered from, you know, setbacks and
failures, both big and small and our lives, our kids are going to
also, and, uh, there’s, you know, and the hard part is because we’re
sort of passive observers of it, there’s a quote, um, Elizabeth Stone
said it, uh, “Making the decision to have a child. It is
momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking
around outside your body.” And I think that sums up not just the
experience of parenting for, for some folks, but also the, the level
of pressure that I think that we, we feel we put upon ourselves that,
you know, again, that kindergarten moment has to be perfect because
it’s my heart there that you’re dealing with. But the fact is is that
our kids are far more resilient than an internal organ. Um, usually,
mostly mostly, at least I choose. So that’s the first piece. I think
the second piece is they are often more capable than we recognize
because when we see them, we see the totality of our experience with,
with them from their first moments until this moment. And we, we
experience all of those at the same time. So it’s hard to remember
that the person standing before you now is a relatively capable near
adult depending on how old they are, who is tougher than most of the
times we give them credit for being simply because we’re also seeing
them in diapers as we are watching them drive away in the car. Um, so
I think, I think those two things are always at work in the head of
a, in the head of a parent as there again, quote unquote launching
their child. Um, I think there’s another though that that comes up,
at least for me, when things don’t go according to plan, which is,
you know, I begin to wonder after I’ve doubted myself, I begin to
doubt my kid. Does it mean that they weren’t committed, that they
gave up too easily? Um, you know, nobody wants a snowflake millennial
for a child. Uh, even if our children millennial, we certainly don’t
want them to be un-resilient. Um, or worse, we worry that maybe
they’re not taking it seriously or even worse than that, that their
being utterly dismissive and disrespectful to our effort. Not to
mention our money. Like, yeah, whatever, you know, they’re sending me
halfway across the world, but I can always come back. It’s no big
deal. They got, they can cover it.

Leon: 18:35 Right,
right. It’s just money. So you know, and you’ve spent months, you
know, trying to get the, you know, doing the school paperwork and
doing the, like you’ve done all that stuff and all of a sudden it
doesn’t, doesn’t go as you expected it to. And you know, there’s a
lot of those feelings that sort of swirl around.

Josh: 18:55 Yeah.
I, I do want to address something about kindergarten. So my daughter
is starting university this week in kindergarten. So in Ontario there
was junior kindergarten. She was three and a half when she started
because her birthday is later in the year. She almost got kicked out
of kindergarten because she would not talk and she refused to leave
her little cubby where she hung her coat. She would sit in that and
would not participate. And the school called us and said, hey, like
maybe this isn’t the right thing for her. Maybe, maybe she shouldn’t
be at school right now. This, this is the girl who hopped on a plane
and flew to Haiti. This is the girl who when they said, we might have
to send you home from Haiti because you know, there’s civil unrest.
There is literally writing in the streets. It was like, no, no, no,
I’m not going. And now she’s headed off to university and I would
have never imagined it. So yes, my daughter was a snowflake in junior
kindergarten. I get it.

New
Speaker: 20:07 Yeah.
And psychologists will call that a telescoping. When you look at your
three year old who’s eating paste and saying, oh, it’s never gonna.
And it’s like, no, don’t telescope. It’s okay. The fact that they do
it now doesn’t mean that they’re always doing it. Or as another great
parenting educator, Barbara Coloroso said, um, “I’ve never yet
seen a high school senior walk down the graduation aisle with the
shoes on the wrong feet unless it was on purpose.” You don’t
need to tell your kids to put the shoes on the right feet. They can
figure that part out for themselves.

Josh: 20:40 I,
I, so I have, I have another story. If you know when you have lots of
children. I have four. When you have lots of children, you have lots
stories. Yes. I have a son who suffers from the, how did we put it?
“Anything is possible when you don’t know what you’re
doing”-itis.

Leon: 20:59 Right.
I’ve worked for managers who suffer from it also. So it’s a fairly
common uh, affliction.

Josh: 21:04 Yeah.
It, it’s, it’s surprising and to, to be fair, part of the, the beauty
of youth is that you have no sweet clue what you can’t do because
you’ve never tried to do it. But some times the things that you’re
trying to do are so wonderfully outlandish that you probably should
not do them. I…in my own life, I wanted to be a lawyer. In fact, I
still would love to be a lawyer. That whole going to school for four
years and then having to go to law school for two or three years and
then having to article for another three or four years just does not
appeal to me. I go figure, I kind of like making money, uh, and, and
eating.

Leon: 21:50 I
was going to say, it’s not the money part, it’s the eating steady
part you become kind of addicted to.

Josh: 21:56 I
have. I have, yeah. My, my waistline can attest to that. So all, all
through high school I was planning on being a lawyer. So I got to my,
my senior year and in Ontario at the time. You went to grade 13 which
was a college, a university prep year. So as I’m entering my, my
university prep here, my guidance counselor calls me in and says,
Hey, you know Josh, I’m looking at your, your transcript, you’ve got
all the IT courses that we offer and you know, what do you plan on
doing? I said, well, I’m going to be a lawyer. So good, but if that
doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll do IT. And he said, well, you know, you
really need to take math. I said, no, no, no. I got all the math
credits I need. I, as I look, I know I’m going to be a lawyer. I
would not be on this podcast if I was a lawyer.

Leon: 22:53 True.
True. As much as I, as much as I have, I enjoy our friendship. It
wouldn’t be that it wouldn’t be Technically Religious anymore.

Josh: 23:00 That’s
right. Yeah. It would just be awkward at that point. So I mean, I did
it the hard way. I, I didn’t take math. I’m also, although I like
math now, I did not like math in high school. I was a little hesitant
to admit to liking math, but I do like math and I really struggled. I
mean, I wanted to be in IT as my backup plan. I didn’t realize it was
going to become my primary plan, but I really hated math and I hated
the math learning experience.

Leon: 23:35 Sure.
So I just want to, I want to frame some of this, you know, talking
about your son and, um, you know, his belief that he can do anything,
even if he doesn’t have sort of the basic background, I think is a
good analog to you wanting to be in IT and not liking math. But I
think that lots of folks who are in it come at it from different
directions. We know that. And, uh, math can be a challenge. And I
think that there’s sort of three ways that you can look at addressing
it. Like, how do we address problems in IT? So there’s sort of the,
the easy way, which is to learn everything about that problem. Right.
I know that sounds like the hard way, but learning it upfront is
actually the easy way. Whether you’re going to a vendor course or
you’re taking a training class or whatever it is, learning it, you
know, from start to finish in that order is the easy way. The
hardware is actually learning as you go, you know, and trying to do
at school of hard knocks and you know, crashing it and rebuilding it
and crashing and rebuilding it and you know, not knowing what you
don’t know and finding out six months later that you actually spec’ed
the systems incorrectly and you have to go back to your director and
ask for more money because you did it wrong the first time or
whatever. Like all that, that is the hard way to go. I think there’s
a, there’s a smart way to go, which is using tools to compensate for
our gaps and knowing that, having humility to know when to use those.
So, uh, you know, for example, uh, I’m, I’m, I like networking and I
am fairly good at networking, but like Cisco Nexus devices are a
whole other class of networking that was not there when I initially
got my CCNA and Routing and Switching and, uh, trying to manage your
monitor those devices is really challenging. But there’s, there are
tools that can show me what’s wrong with a Nexus installation so that
I can get past those gaps in knowledge and skill and experience
without the hard knocks and without having to take, you know, three
months of classes just to get up to speed on it.

Josh: 25:47 Hmm.
Interesting. Uh, I, I am also afraid of, uh, of the Nexus. It, it, to
me, I see one of those large spaghetti, horrible monsters with a
billion arms. And that’s all I can think of when I think of an axis.

Josh: 26:04 Not
Invisible at all. It’s actually kind of horrifying. Uh, so if, if we
were to then like, maybe modify this for people like me. Yep. Um, how
would I handle this today? What would the advice be to Josh from
1995-ish?

Josh: 26:30 And
explain how, how I can be successful in it. Um, even though I didn’t
like math.

Leon: 26:38 Okay.
So I think that, um, again, easy way, hard way, smart way. The easy
to go learn it. Now, part of the problem is that you didn’t have the
math credits in high school to get into a school immediately that had
it, you know, like you couldn’t have hacked the coursework. Um, but
you know, in America we have, you know, community colleges, sort of
those smaller local colleges that are easier to get into. And a great
way to get a leg up on stuff is just to take a community college set
of community college courses one or two years and get into it and get
those skills up and then transition to a more, um, challenging school
where you’re gonna get the depth experience.

Josh: 27:21 Oh,
nice. Yeah. So, and in Canada we call those a two and two. Right? So
you do a two year of college and the Canada college is different than
university and then there is a matriculation agreement where you can
get into usually third year, um, provided that you successfully
completed the coursework in the first two years.

Leon: 27:40 Right.
So that’s, that would be the easy way. The hard way would be not to
go to college at all and not to get any training, but just to open
your own IT business and uh, learn as you go, you know, break things
as you go and probably fail that business and then you get into IT.
Having had all that wonderful painful experience, that would be the
hard way. Right?

Josh: 28:06 Yeah.
I, I did it kind of that way. I mean, I didn’t start a business, but
I got married at 21 had an instant family, was, my wife was pregnant
a month later I went to school, worked midnights, um, and then got a
job working 60 hours a week while trying to get my MCSE. Is that
hard?

Leon: 28:31 One
order of myocardial infarction please. Coming up! Yeah. So yeah,
that’s, that would have been the really hard way. Um, and some of us
do that and I think that there’s, again, the smart way that in
between way, which is, um, as much as we say that IT requires math,
it doesn’t require all math. It requires a very specific set of math
that if you take a little bit of time to understand the area of IT
you want to get into, then you can focus on just learning the math
you need for that area. Right.

Josh: 29:09 I’m
a, I’m a big fan of that model. I wish that my 18 year old self could
have a discussion with my 40 (ahem!) year old self and I could say,
look, you can do this now. I get it when I was 18, things like Khan
Academy or, uh, you know, Code Camp didn’t exist. But wow, kids
today, if, if you know the thing that you want, the thing that gets
you really excited about math and it’s not going and taking
trigonometry then learn the math that gets you geeked. For me it’s
statistics. I really love stats.

Leon: 29:46 Right.
And I think that that’s another thing that, um, you know, the
difference between non young adult, our non young adult kids is that,
you know, what are they gonna have to do this Algebra?!? Because it’s
ninth grade curriculum and you’re going to do it. I don’t have
another answer. This, this is stupid. I’m never gonna use it. Can’t
argue for or against that, but it’s still in a curriculum and you’re
going to do it like that is the parenting conversation. But with our
young adults, we can say, look, if you love this thing, if you love
doing this thing, whether it’s it or business or whatever, there’s
going to be math involved. But you just have to learn that. But if
you love this thing, you’re going to love the math that goes along
with it. And if you don’t love it, at least you’re going to tolerate
it. So being monitoring Geeks, both you and I, you know, math is also
not my strong suit. It’s not something that I naturally gravitate
toward the way that some of the other voices we have on the show,
like Doug, you know, Doug Johnson who really does love math, you
know, that’s, that’s a different, that’s a different thing that love
of pure math. But I really enjoy the math that I get to do when I’m
scripting, when I’m pulling statistics out of devices for monitoring,
when I’m building new visualizations. That math really gets me going
because I know what I’m doing with it because it has an application.
Um, so that’s, you know, that’s what we can say to our adult or young
adult kids is even if you think you don’t like it from school, “Uhhh,
it really bad!” The fact is that you will like it because it’s
part of the thing that you’re telling me that you like,

Leon: 31:25 We
know you can’t listen to our podcast all day. So out of respect for
your time, we’ve broken this particular conversation up, come back
next week and we’ll continue our conversation.

Doug
Johnson: 31:34 Thanks
for making time for us this week to hear more of technically
religious visit our website, technically religious.com where you can
find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and
connect to us on social media.

Leon: 31:47 Test
in dev?! Not me! I test in prod!! What can possibly go wrong?